Let’s say I want to go to Planet Mozilla, so I start typing out “planet”, and before I even finish typing it out, the page has loaded over the current tab. This could be useful to take a quick peek at a page like xkcd, and then hit <esc> to return to where I left off.

Combining this with smart bookmark keywords, I can type “g” followed by some word, and it’s almost like Google Instant search. But this works for other search engines like Bing.. or even Wikipedia. As long as the site returns the page fast enough, it already feels pretty good.

Hi,
you’re using autoplay=”false” on the video tag. I think it’s not working like this. If the attribute autoplay is there, it is true no matter what you try to set it to. So while the intention was good, your video is automatically loading nevertheless.
Loading videos automatically is ok if the user is likely to watch it. This might be true for someone coming to this page but your posting is also included from planet.mozilla.org’s blog entry list as well. Many people there might not want to load it. Hope it helped.

@Mic, sorry for causing you problems. Where are you seeing this (platform/os)? I added autoplay=false because when I had it before, it would start playing by itself in Opera. Firefox 4 and Chrome support webm, Firefox 3.5/3.6 ogv, and Safari mov.

I checked on planet.mozilla.org when it first got syndicated and the embed tag was actually stripped out, so perhaps it’s not the embed causing you problems.

Just curious, without any supporting evidences for this, I would like to know if there is any security measures to prevent users from loading unwanted websites. Sometimes, websites that have been visited by a user before, may become a malicious website afterwards due to domain name expiration or hacking, would this auto-loading protect the users from that? (in times where anti-phishing has not kicked in yet)

would this auto-loading protect the users from that? (in times where anti-phishing has not kicked in yet)

Other than the normal blacklisting mechanism built into Firefox, there’s no additional auto-loading protection provided by the add-on. But the use case is somewhat odd as if you didn’t know the site was hacked, and you wanted to go there, you would have loaded the url anyway instead of letting this add-on auto-load it.

@Marcus: Yeah, the functionality is similar to Ubiquity, but it’s implemented very differently. This is actually “more like the web” as Ubiquity needed custom code support for each action, but that also allowed the commands to be more powerful and interactive.

I think sites would not thank you for deploying this. Wikipedia’s load would go from one search per search to one search per _letter_ in the search! It’s like the prefetching stuff – we never turned that on globally.